Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terrain

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

Cool paper, I wish I had read it when originally working on this stuff but I did all of the architecture work in September of 2012.

I think your paper does a good job of highlighting a lot of interesting techniques and certainly some of the stuff in there (like relaxing the uv's) is used in PA. However, the whole planet still suffers from the "blob" look that you get from not having enough voxel resolution and that's the problem I was specifically trying to avoid with the design of our system (as you can see in the original concept video that has some nice hard edges in it).

Anyway I thought you paper was very well done.

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

Yes. This is the main reason for breaking it up into pieces.

Actual algorithm would take a while to describe but once some setup is done each brush only needs to mutate itself until the final stitching process (which is fast).

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

Thanks , I will certainly try to add support for more sharp features. I only use voxels as an intermediate step. If I render out an extra LOD, the sampling doubles, but does take up a lot of render time. I also apply most of my noise after this sampling, meaning I could subdivide everything and render out more sharp features. But I guess I could try to add support for this at lower resolutions as well.

here is Miguel Cepero's blog, he is building a real time voxel world, which has support for more sharper edges, stepping away from simple cubemarching. http://procworld.blogspot.nl/2012/10/snow-biomes.html
I think this blog contains more stuff that could be useful, like texturing techniques.

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

Off topic: Damn Acey, you're at the University I -would- be going to if the system didn't mess up my place last year, and if my parents could afford the overlap with my brother going to uni this year -.-

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

That is tough :/. I could send you some of the course material, if you want, depending on the subject you wanted to train in. edit: Pm me if you want

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

CSG is a very nontrivial decision for ingame terrain system, indeed. Honestly, I've never considered any models beyond heightmap and voxel/volumetric for that purpose. BTW, considering we have deformable terrain and terraforming, how the engine will avoid geometry tree overgrowth caused by continous deformation of the same parts? I.e.:

Will such a deformation cause transformtions of a deleted plates to be truncated, or next deformation will rebuild plate from initial state through all its transformations up to deletion?

Another interesting question is physics. If we destroy foundation of hangover, can it act as an independent object, i.e. fall to the ground, or it will continue to float mid-air?

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

Very cool. CSG made me cringe a bit initially as it brought back memories of Unreal 2.5 and all the silly rules you had to follow to keep the CSG clean. It does sound like a good solution for this scenario, though.

I assume this just means the terrain and nav system will support caves/layers. The game would need some sort of UI mod to allow giving unit orders on underground terrain, yes?

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

Yeah, the UI is the tricky part. We are just trying to solve it for planets with canyons and some bridges.

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

Yussssssss

I can has real city maps?

Mike

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

Define "real" city maps.

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

Actually, not that I think about it, that's a good question, I guess something along the lines of what was seen in the FA intro, but obviously more varied than that...

Mike

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

Coruscant.

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

Urban scrapyards.

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

I think if we could battle across city terrain of bridges and buildings (or metal planet layers) that would be really cool.

Vertical space as a tactical / strategic aspect is going to be awesome.

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

We therefore then need climbing units.

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

Im guessing massive sort of urba areas on multiple levels and stuff like that. Im going to assume along the lines of Coruscant from Starwars type stuff maybe? i dunno but thats id like to see on metal worlds actually fights sprawling across multiple levels as your units battle to keep control of various bridges across giant metalic chasms! whilst fighters streak through them engaged in dog fights.

The AWESOME is endless!

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

Great read Jon, thanks!

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

Just as an FYI we aren't currently building cities but I could definitely see that being interesting down the road.

Coruscant is probably pushing it a bit far too...

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

City maps are a very popular idea since the FA intro. You have no idea how many requests I got as mapper to make a huge city map in FA. I even started once but there were a lot of problems that held me back in the SupCom engine. I did manage to build whole city blocks from prop buildings though without using mods. But then I got lazy...

Re: Planetary Annihilation Engine Architecture Update - Terr

For the engine?
For the AI?
Or for the scope of Uber's release.

WE could always build Corscant.